Facebook announced a new method of sorting and consuming information disseminated on the social network at a press conference in Menlo Park, CA Tuesday. The service, called “Graph Search,” allows users to enter a query on Facebook and get answers based on cross-sections of information within their social network.

“Graph search is not Web search,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a Web search with the query “hip-hop” will present links about hip-hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

Zuckerberg described “people, photos, places, and interests” as four potential search dimensions for graph search. Zuckerberg used the intersections of these areas to see Mexican restaurants his friends had been to in the Palo Alto area, as well as to find the best-liked photo of him and his wife in order to decide which one to use on a Christmas card. Graph search queries use phrases rather than keywords: “Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter” was one example.

Facebook noted that the search could apply not only to current friends, but to people a user might have met in real life and “[wants] to meet them on Facebook.” For instance, if a user met at friend of a friend who mentioned he went to Kenyon but didn’t catch his last name, the query “People named Andrew who are friends with Jacqui and went to Kenyon” would locate him” (if his privacy settings allow him to be searchable). Facebook also hinted at the possibilities of the site as a place to get dates—simply query “Friends of friends who are single men,” ladies.

Other searches that users could conduct: friends with photos tagged in Yellowstone National Park or Paris, France; TV shows enjoyed by software engineers; bars in Dublin, Ireland that have been “liked” specifically by people who live in Dublin, Ireland.

Facebook stressed that users can only search content that has been shared with them—for instance, if it’s not in your profile that you watch Game of Thrones or you never check in to the Mexican restaurants you frequent, you’ll never appear in those searches. However, if a friend checks you in to a Mexican restaurant you attend with them and makes that post public, that will likely feed into any graph searches your friends do. Likewise, it appears that any post that is public (i.e., technically shared with every Facebook user) can be involved in a query made by any user, regardless of their degree of direct social involvement with you.

Zuckerberg highlighted the new privacy controls Facebook introduced in recent weeks. The service now allows users to batch-untag pictures or posts from an Activity Log pane on the website, as well as create a request within the same window requesting that the photo owner remove the post or picture completely.

Users who may be interested in this feature could flock to more completely fill in their interests, activities, and photos. But the opposite may also happen: users who don’t want to be involved in their friends’ searches might be compelled to scrape their profiles of salient information and start worrying about how their friends involve them by tagging them in posts, check-ins, and pictures.

Zuckerberg ended by pointing out that Facebook search also integrates with Bing, to fill in the search gaps that users may try to fulfill with graph search.

A limited beta of Facebook's graph search will begin rolling out January 16. Initially, the searches will only be able to be conducted in English (spoken by 40 percent of the service's user base), but Zuckerberg stated that Facebook was only "starting" with that language.

Facebook's event is currently in progress, and we will update this article as more details become available. For up-to-the-minute information, you can watch our liveblog.

Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a web search with the query “hip hop” will present links about hip hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

If you don't know which of your friends live in (insert city here), then maybe you should review the meaning of the word 'friend'.

Because "people whom I was previously on friendly terms with but whom I haven't talked to in a while and I want to reconnect with" takes longer to say than just "friend". Or maybe you're just interested in friends of friends.

Let's say you're interviewing for a job in Seattle and don't know anyone there. In that case, you don't need close friends. The old college classmate whom you fell out of touch with after moving to different cities ten years ago may not be a close friend but might be a Facebook "friend" and would probably suffice for purposes like providing a couch to crash on or asking questions like, "Does the weather bother you?"

34 posts | registered Sep 3, 2011

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Until someone shows that people will pay directly for an advertisement free Facebook, we should maybe dial down the mocking of them creating tools to help advterisers- money has to come from somewhere.

Eduardo Saverin, is that you?

Seriously, let's not cry poverty on Facebook's behalf. They have smart people. I'm sure they can figure out ways to generate advertising revenue without encouraging users to to lower their privacy settings and get bombarded with unwanted content.

I like how they pretend they made something cool when all they did was make database queries public in stead of hard-coded in. Not to say they probably didn't work hard at it, but its still a simple feature wrapped up in a pretty box.

Tin-foil hat time: This is just a public release of the back-end system they already wrote in for the government so they can perform searches when necessary.

Replace "government" with "advertisers" and you got it spot on. This isn't tin foil hat material at all. We all know what FB business model is.

Until someone shows that people will pay directly for an advertisement free Facebook, we should maybe dial down the mocking of them creating tools to help advterisers- money has to come from somewhere.

Maybe if they offered a pay service for ad-free Facebook, people could buy it and they could determine how much demand there really is. It's kind of hard for "someone" to prove anything when it's not an available option in the first place.

During the presentation, Zuck stated that when performing searches on content not related to your friends/graph such as for the current weather or Rhianna's new album:"There's nothing here., so it shows a Bing-powered websearch"and also that:"it's not something we have indexed in the graph, yet."

So I take this to mean that Facebook indexes their own graphs yet when there are 0 results, it kicks the query over to Bing, which is reiterated in Q&A:Q from London: did MS have any involvement in graph search?Lars: If we don't think we can answer your question we start showing suggestions from Bing.

Yet this question takes that assumption off the rails:Q from Danny Sullivan: Can you tell us more about what Google won't do that you want them to do?Z: I think the main this is that when people share something on Facebook, we want to give them the ability to broadcast something, and take it down. That requires quick updating. If Loren removes that account, we need that content to be gone immediately. That takes a lot of commitment from the partner. Google has a system that works really well for them and I think our system is different. That was the biggest stumbling block.

Based on their statements, I wouldn't expect Bing to be doing any spidering or powering these queries thus they would not have any information to remove. Likewise, if Google was the one getting the queries where "we don't think we can answer your question" they too would not have any information to remove.

Until someone shows that people will pay directly for an advertisement free Facebook, we should maybe dial down the mocking of them creating tools to help advterisers- money has to come from somewhere.

++. People are always complaining about ads and privacy, but I don't see anyone ponying up to pay even a couple bucks a month for an ad-free Facebook or an ad-free Google. Nor do most smartphone users (or at least most Android users) have any interest in paying for ad-free apps whenever there is an ad-supported version, no matter how many ads it shows or how much tracking it does.

I always assumed FB had this kind of search ability internally so they could target ads better.

Exactly, this sounds like they're just taking those features public and making a big fuss about it.

Facebook continues to disappoint.

Yeah. Was going to say...... do people REALLY think Facebook didn't have this ability previously? It just wasn't "common knowledge" or available to the "average user" (in other words, companies paying Facebook for data mining).

I like how they pretend they made something cool when all they did was make database queries public in stead of hard-coded in. Not to say they probably didn't work hard at it, but its still a simple feature wrapped up in a pretty box.

Tin-foil hat time: This is just a public release of the back-end system they already wrote in for the government so they can perform searches when necessary.

If it supports natural language search queries, that's a pretty impressive development either way.

It doesn't sound like natural language queries. The text looked VERY formulistic. I.e. more like SQL by any other name just with a syntax that sounds more human.

friends who like {X} AND|OR LIVE IN|NEAR {Y} AND|OR WENT TO {Z}

X being objects that can be liked possibly with a hierarchyY being locations.Z being locations, stores

Not exactly PHD worthy. The biggest problem would be that they need to create a pretty new search index. After all its no full text search but you have millions of people connected by billions of connections, who like a huge amount of objects in a complex ontology. It cannot be easy to create a search index for something like that. The language front-end will be their smallest problem.

Of course for my direct friends they wouldn't need a search index they could just brute force search the couple dozen/hundred "friends" I have. But the moment an advertiser wants to query the whole world it is different.

If these people were REAL friends then you would know where they liked to eat, the kinds of movies they watch, other cities they may been too... mostly because you would be doing these things WITH them, but also because you interact with them in meatspace (or as some people call it, real life).

Also, personalized searches should be about what I like and what I have looked for in the past, not about what other people have looked for (based on what there freinds liked, which is based on what there friends liked)... basically anything Kevin Bacon likes.

I like how they pretend they made something cool when all they did was make database queries public in stead of hard-coded in. Not to say they probably didn't work hard at it, but its still a simple feature wrapped up in a pretty box.

Tin-foil hat time: This is just a public release of the back-end system they already wrote in for the government so they can perform searches when necessary.

Replace "government" with "advertisers" and you got it spot on. This isn't tin foil hat material at all. We all know what FB business model is.

I hope that I am not double posting, I tried to post this a moment ago but it did not seem to have come up.

Most of my close friends are quite diverse from me and even more so on Facebook due to all of my acquaintances and family members on there, hence I have always found their likes only slightly more useful than a public survey. I would be much more interested in the likes of the people who frequent the same websites as me.

If I want to invite friends over for a game of thrones evening or whatever lameass example they used, I don't search my contacts for "people who like game of thrones", I just ask people. This gives the people who aren't into game of thrones but might like to give it a try while hanging out with friends a chance to pop up.

There's the real social. Right there. Talking to people, not searching them.

Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a web search with the query “hip hop” will present links about hip hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

If you don't know which of your friends live in (insert city here), then maybe you should review the meaning of the word 'friend'.

Because "people whom I was previously on friendly terms with but whom I haven't talked to in a while and I want to reconnect with" takes longer to say than just "friend". Or maybe you're just interested in friends of friends.

Let's say you're interviewing for a job in Seattle and don't know anyone there. In that case, you don't need close friends. The old college classmate whom you fell out of touch with after moving to different cities ten years ago may not be a close friend but might be a Facebook "friend" and would probably suffice for purposes like providing a couch to crash on or asking questions like, "Does the weather bother you?"

During the presentation, Zuck stated that when performing searches on content not related to your friends/graph such as for the current weather or Rhianna's new album:"There's nothing here., so it shows a Bing-powered websearch"and also that:"it's not something we have indexed in the graph, yet."

So I take this to mean that Facebook indexes their own graphs yet when there are 0 results, it kicks the query over to Bing, which is reiterated in Q&A:Q from London: did MS have any involvement in graph search?Lars: If we don't think we can answer your question we start showing suggestions from Bing.

Yet this question takes that assumption off the rails:Q from Danny Sullivan: Can you tell us more about what Google won't do that you want them to do?Z: I think the main this is that when people share something on Facebook, we want to give them the ability to broadcast something, and take it down. That requires quick updating. If Loren removes that account, we need that content to be gone immediately. That takes a lot of commitment from the partner. Google has a system that works really well for them and I think our system is different. That was the biggest stumbling block.

Based on their statements, I wouldn't expect Bing to be doing any spidering or powering these queries thus they would not have any information to remove. Likewise, if Google was the one getting the queries where "we don't think we can answer your question" they too would not have any information to remove.

Did I miss something?

[I work at Bing, I work with our social search team which uses the platform software I work on to power many of their features]

Yeah, you're missing something. We have powered web search from Facebook for a couple years (a feature that is virtually unknown and little used). Some of the integration here is a continuation of this.

We have also worked hard with Facebook to ingest their data according to their requirements for Bing's Facebook integration (launched last May). This means much more than a generic crawling of their site.

When I read these answers I think that what Zuck is saying is that if Google wants to step up and do the work to ingest Facebook data in the way that Facebook requires to make use of it at the deep level Bing does then he's interested in working with them. To date apparently they have not offered to do this.

As someone who has run ads on Facebook (don't hate me, my boss made me do it! Besides which it helps pay for it for those of you who like it ) I can tell you that all of these features already existed. I could target an advertisement for those who like the page, or those who don't like the page, for geographic regions, for interests, and for likes. Heck, they toss demographic data in as well (age ranges, life stages such as married and for how long, etc).

None of this is new, just that it is being used by regular users and not marketers, and that it is formatted a bit different.

If I need any god damn information from friends I will ask them in person this feature is useless to the average user

[Fixed capslock issues for you]

Can you share your methodology and data for determining that you are the representative "average Facebook user" and thus were able to extrapolate your personal preferences to this sweeping generalization?

What a let down of an announcement. Facebook was really cool, and still is for a lot of things, but for them to make money they have to make it less worthwhile for me. And for it to be the best for me, they won't make much money.

I don't see any need to leave Facebook like many have done, but I definitely get less out of it now. I liked seeing updates from school friends that I didn't know well enough to pick up the phone and call out of the blue, but connecting on FB, seeing what they were doing, and saying Happy Birthday was good enough. Now it seems like I get updates from a much smaller group (but people I spend more time with regularly) and more ads.

You can tell FB to require you to approve any time someone tags you in a photo, post, etc.

No, you can't. You can tell Facebook not to include it in your timeline prior to your approval, and you can ask Facebook for any tag of you to be removed. You can't preempt people from tagging you in their photos, posts and statuses. Tags of you will still be visible in their timeline without your approval, unless you go to the trouble of removing them.

Yes that's true; I misspoke. However, you can set your notifications to email you whenever someone tags you in anything, so you can delete anything you don't like/want without needing to manually search for them.

As someone who has run ads on Facebook (don't hate me, my boss made me do it! Besides which it helps pay for it for those of you who like it ) I can tell you that all of these features already existed. I could target an advertisement for those who like the page, or those who don't like the page, for geographic regions, for interests, and for likes. Heck, they toss demographic data in as well (age ranges, life stages such as married and for how long, etc).

None of this is new, just that it is being used by regular users and not marketers, and that it is formatted a bit different.

When you have run Facebook ads, do the ad reports provide any information on the number of users that the targeted ad would hit if their privacy settings weren't configured in a particular way? For example, your ad identified 500,000 impression possibilities but only 300,000 were able to be used because the other 200k have strict privacy settings?

Yes that's true; I misspoke. However, you can set your notifications to email you whenever someone tags you in anything, so you can delete anything you don't like/want without needing to manually search for them.

Right. And so, the only reason I'm still on Facebook is to police what others say about me.

Like the daughter of the deceased photographer that my parents hired to do my baptism, posting all the old pictures she dug up from her father's basement on Facebook, and tagging me and my entire family and everyone else her father took photos of. And she thought she was doing us a service, going through all the trouble of scanning those.

Facebook founder and CEO. Zuckerberg pointed out that a web search with the query “hip hop” will present links about hip hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?”

If you don't know which of your friends live in (insert city here), then maybe you should review the meaning of the word 'friend'.

Because "people whom I was previously on friendly terms with but whom I haven't talked to in a while and I want to reconnect with" takes longer to say than just "friend". Or maybe you're just interested in friends of friends.

Let's say you're interviewing for a job in Seattle and don't know anyone there. In that case, you don't need close friends. The old college classmate whom you fell out of touch with after moving to different cities ten years ago may not be a close friend but might be a Facebook "friend" and would probably suffice for purposes like providing a couch to crash on or asking questions like, "Does the weather bother you?"

Part of the problem the OP has, which your reply doesn't address, is that Facebook and its ilk are overloading the word "friend", and some of us catch a whiff of Doublespeak when we see that happening.

Yes, "friend" is a lot shorter than "people whom I was previously on friendly terms with but whom I haven't talked to in a while and I want to reconnect with". But English has plenty of other words to describe people to whom we have some connection, but aren't close enough to call friends. Why not use them rather than dilute the meaning of the word "friend"?

[I work at Bing, I work with our social search team which uses the platform software I work on to power many of their features]

Yeah, you're missing something. We have powered web search from Facebook for a couple years (a feature that is virtually unknown and little used). Some of the integration here is a continuation of this.

We have also worked hard with Facebook to ingest their data according to their requirements for Bing's Facebook integration (launched last May). This means much more than a generic crawling of their site.

When I read these answers I think that what Zuck is saying is that if Google wants to step up and do the work to ingest Facebook data in the way that Facebook requires to make use of it at the deep level Bing does then he's interested in working with them. To date apparently they have not offered to do this.

Many thanks for the informative reply. This makes even more sense why Google would not be the best choice and gives a bit more background why they may not be used in future (not even considering their competing platform).